You know that feeling when you've spent ages on your makeup only to look in the mirror and decide you hate it? And you forgo your usual cleansing routine to angrily smear it off your face with the sides of your fists, à la Demi Moore in The Substance? That feeling is not random. In fact, it's intimate friends with the prickly feeling in your chest when you discover that your boyfriend has been watching extreme porn. It's there when your boss calls you a ‘good girl’ or lightly touches your lower back as he moves to get past you in the office. It's a feeling many women have experienced, but have struggled to make sense of – until now.
In her new book, Girl on Girl: How Pop Culture Turned a Generation of Women Against Themselves, Atlantic critic and Pulitzer Prize finalist Sophie Gilbert, charts how the hell we got here – and why, after four waves of feminism, women still feel so bad about their bodies, themselves, and each other.
The answer, Sophie writes, lies in the pop culture we've consumed over the last three decades, from Terry Richardson's ‘porno-chic’ dominating the fashion industry to the paparazzi upskirting vulnerable female celebrities. Here, she speaks to GLAMOUR about girl dinners, the female gaze, and the normalisation of violent porn, as well as providing a sneak peek into the book itself.
GLAMOUR: Hi Sophie! It's great to chat with you about your new book, Girls On Girls. At 16, your impression of women's power was something “sexual in nature”; how do you envision women's power now?
I think we've come a long way, but the nature of visibility in our current moment really complicates things. I was thinking a lot about women and power for the final chapter of the book, and it struck me that one form of power that women have wielded really adeptly over the last decade is influence.
Some women have become so good at influencing others to do things, but more often than not, that influence involves selling products that supposedly make other women look sexier, or younger. And I do wonder what would happen if that force of influence could be redirected toward getting other women to vote, or to organise in their community, or something more active. It feels like we have all this energetic potential that's getting squandered on persuading people to try a new lipstick.
But it's also so thrilling to see stars these days who explore sexuality on their own terms in their work, and don't seem remotely concerned about what men will think. Chappell Roan is endlessly sexual in her music, but none of what she does is for men, and I find that so incredible to see.
“There is a part of myself that is just for me, and I don’t want that taken away from me.”
You write about girl trips, girl talk, hot girl summers, and girl dinners. Where do you think this need for self-infantilisation came from? And should we be worried about it?
It wasn't lost on me that the girlhood revival in culture came right after the overturning of Roe v. Wade and the rise of really ugly voices in the manosphere. Around 2022, things felt really bleak for women's rights and status in so many ways. So it does make sense to me that people might try to find comfort and solace in the safe space of girlhood.
Something that the Barbie movie captured so well for me was how often in girlhood we're told that our potential and opportunities are limitless – that we can be anything we want, dream anything, make anything happen. It's such a creative time because we're still (hopefully) insulated from reality. So I see this particular revival as less about self-infantilisation than about trying to get back to a state and a time when things felt safer and more nurturing.
You write that porn seems to have “filtered its way through absolutely everything in mass media,” and that “the more mainstream culture embraced porn’s imagery, the more porn—to maintain its transgressive status – had to look out to the margins.” Do you think this – partially, at least – explains the rise of some OnlyFans sex workers, like Lily Phillips and Bonnie Blue, opting for increasingly extreme stunts, such as sleeping with 1000 men in 24 hours?
Absolutely. In the book, I mention Annabel Chong, who also became infamous during the 1990s for extreme sexual stunts. The more mainstream porn becomes, the more everyone involved has to up the ante to keep making money. But we also live very much in an attention economy now, where it's even easier to monetise people's clicks and eyeballs. So the stunts in question aren't new, nor is the prurient media fascination with them. But the incentive to do something extreme is even greater.
“It should ring alarm bells that so many men are willing to chase gratification at the expense of treating a woman like a human being.”
Do you think popular culture can ever truly centre the female gaze?
Yes, absolutely. There have been so many shows and movies recently that have tried to do exactly that – I'm thinking about Disney's Dying for Sex, and Halina Reijn's Babygirl, but also something like The Substance, which reckoned with body dysmorphia and self-obsession in such interesting ways. But even a show like Girls was really significant for all the ways in which it wasn't made to titillate men, or even to care about what they thought at all. The backlash to the show was so cruel in so many ways for that fact alone – people seemed offended that Lena Dunham would be naked onscreen because she didn't look like a Playboy model. But she kept making her show anyway, and it's only now that we can really see clearly what that meant.
As millennial women reckon with growing up during the toxic aughts, do you think young girls today fare any better?
I'm really torn. I think younger women today are so much savvier – they're so much more clued in on the dynamics of misogyny and the internet and they have all this language and access to all these voices online who help educate us all. The diversity of people speaking out is so much greater, and that's so heartening.
But they're also stuck in this media environment that incentivises us all to scrutinise ourselves all day long—to look at our faces over and over in HD, and to find fault, and to pick at ourselves. And what that does is distract us from looking outward and seeing everything that's wrong with the world, and from trying to change it. But the storytelling is so much better, and I do still believe that has the power to shape the way the future turns out.
The lead stars of the hit Disney+ series talk about rejecting sexual shame, female friendship, and the power of female anger.
If you're ready for more, here's an extract from Sophie Gilbert's new book, Girl on Girl: How Pop Culture Turned a Generation of Women Against Themselves.
I started thinking about writing this book early in the 2020s, in a moment when time no longer seemed linear, progress no longer felt inevitable, and every ugly trend I’d come of age with as a Y2K teen had looped its way right back around.
Hillary Clinton’s failed presidential campaign in 2016, followed by the explosion of testimony regarding sexual abuse and harassment that manifested as the #MeToo movement a year later, made certain realities self‐evident. The recreational misogyny of the aughts was back, this time with new technology and a cult figurehead, Andrew Tate, who’d once appeared on the reality series Big Brother while under investigation for rape.
Wives and girlfriends' tabloid obsession had been reinvented for TikTok, where doll‐like women murmured in affectless monologues about living the financially dependent dream of a “soft, feminine life.” The body‐positivity movement, which had done its utmost to claim space for normal bodies in media and retail, was rapidly being shunted out of favour by the rise of weight‐loss medication and a whole new crop of women with whittled-down waists and jutting rib cages.
Everything old was new again, and yet things were also darker and more disengaged.
Trying to hustle your way up the corporate ladder is so last decade.
In 2022, the overturning of Roe v. Wade marked the most tangible rollback of women’s rights in half a century. Culturally, the motif of the moment was impossible to avoid, and it seemed to pinpoint how small our collective ambitions had become.
Women my age were suddenly trading friendship bracelets and decoding messages supposedly embedded in pop lyrics with the intensity of CIA cryptographers. We went on girl trips, traded girl talk, had “hot girl summers,” and picked at girl dinners. In 2023, I put on my best millennial‐pink blazer – the one I wear for panel discussions – and stood in a line of women all equally psyched to have our photos taken in an adult‐sized doll box, as if a moment of visual solidarity could make up for losing our reproductive rights.
The Barbie world, with its all‐female Supreme Court and hegemonic femininity, only made it clear that we were all still playing with scraps of power. At the end of 2024, once again, a competent, accomplished, empathetic woman was beaten in the US presidential race by a failed businessman and convicted felon whose platform was elevated by some of the most proudly vicious misogynists and white supremacists in modern memory. Who wouldn’t want to be a girl again, given the alternative?
So much of this malaise felt familiar. There was a moment at the beginning of the twenty‐first century when feminism felt just as nebulous and inert, squashed by a cultural explosion of jokey extremity and technicolor objectification. This was the environment that millennial women were raised in. It informed how we felt about ourselves, how we saw each other, and what we understood women as a collective to be capable of. It coloured our ambitions, our sense of self, our relationships, our bodies, our work, and our art. I came to believe that we couldn’t move forward without fully reckoning with how the culture of the aughts had defined us.
From reproductive rights to women in conflict.
.jpg)
With this book, I wanted, from the position of a critic, to excavate how and why every genre of entertainment at this time –music, movies, TV, fashion, magazines, porn – was sending girls the same message, one that we internalized with rigor.
I wanted to understand how a generation of young women came to believe that sex was our currency, our objectification was empowering, and we were a joke. Why were we so easily persuaded of our own inadequacy? Who was setting the agenda? Why, for decades and even now, has virtually every cultural product been so insistently oriented around male desire and male pleasure?
I didn’t necessarily expect to find all the answers. My main goal was to reframe recent history in a way that might enhance my own perspective. But what became clear was how neatly culture, feminism, and history run on parallel tracks, informing, disrupting, and even derailing each other. I also became fascinated by the echoes – connections, repetitions, and trends across time and genres. They’re still reverberating now, as we continue to seesaw erratically between progress and backlash.
For more from Glamour UK's Lucy Morgan, follow her on Instagram @lucyalexxandra.
The White Lotus finale is a cautionary tale: try and save the overcast-cloud men at your peril.
